Windows doesn't see 4GB. If you have a 32bit OS with 4GB of RAM, Windows can't see it all.

I saw this very interesting post from Hilton Locke at Microsoft on the issue. Apparently it's mostly hardware, depending on what you have, and an architectural decision that there are memory mapped IO reservations.

Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest